The subject matter described herein relates to service and application management in information technology (IT) systems.
IT systems, such as enterprise computing systems, may facilitate efficient planning and delivery of an company's products and services to consumers. Such systems may incorporate both hardware and software system and application components. For example, such systems may incorporate an extensive array of hardware components, such as application servers, data servers, networking equipment and client computer devices. The client computer devices may access and manipulate the data in application servers via a network, such as an intranet, extranet or Internet. Data and application servers may be centrally organized in one or more data centers, or the servers may be distributed across departments and sites of the organization.
An enterprise computing system may employ various software packages, such as an enterprise software component (e.g., enterprise resource planning (ERP) software), to manage data within the company. ERP software allows a company to efficiently process data that is used by multiple departments. As an example, a manufacturing company may employ an ERP system to manage its manufacturing, sales and financial departments. More particularly, an ERP system may provide resources for a sales department to track orders for products; resources for a purchasing department to track orders for parts needed to manufacture the ordered products; resources for a manufacturing department to track products through the manufacturing process and to manage inventory; resources for a sales department to track order fulfillment and generally manage interactions with customers; and resources for a financial department to track parts costs, pay suppliers, track orders and process payments for fulfilled orders.
Other software packages of an enterprise computing system may include various modules (or components) that may be used alone or integrated with other modules. For example, a company may employ a supply chain management (SCM) module to support the organization's manufacturing operations; an organization may employ a customer relations management (CRM) module to log interactions between, for example, a marketing department and a prospective customer or a support department and a current customer; and a company may employ a financials module to budget its operations, pay suppliers and employees, and receive payment from customers. Some companies may employ ERP software that integrates each of these modules into a single integrated system.
Most conventional ERP software and related modules (e.g., CRM, SCM, etc.) require considerable time, effort, knowledge and experience in order to implement, monitor and operate on a day-to-day basis, and upgrade to ensure a stable enterprise computing system. The activities required to manage the installation, the operation, the upgrade and the optimization of ERP software and related modules running on the enterprise computing system can be categorized as operations activities (e.g., the day-to-day monitoring of the ERP software and related modules for malfunction events, such as operational parameter changes [e.g., error messages, system failures, core dumps, etc.]), support activities (e.g., problem and malfunction support), change and deploy activities (e.g., installation of and updating the ERP software and related modules) and plan and optimize activities (e.g. improving long-term stability of the enterprise computing system operations or providing transparency about the deployed software resources).
IT departments, even large ones, often get lost in a maze of complex tools and thousands of pages of administration guides that are available to assist them in managing and performing these activities. Moreover, these IT departments, in particular their IT administrators, that use these software tools are still overwhelmed with various day-to-day reactive support tasks, such as manually monitoring, checking and clearing log files, manually performing patches and updates, manually executing backup and recovery procedures, user management, and managing and assisting end users, such as processing service requests and supporting end users having trouble with the customer's systems. Smaller IT departments, especially those that have limited resources and operating budgets, often cannot afford to acquire all the necessary software tools to assist them in managing and performing these activities. As such, these IT departments often spend a lot of their time on the day-to-day operations rather than on improving the operation of their company's enterprise computing system, which typically would decrease the time needed for day-to-day operations.
Additionally, sometimes IT departments cannot resolve particular service requests on their own and require the expertise of the ERP software manufacturer or service provider to resolve the service request. For example, a service request may involve an error in the ERP software that requires a software patch. Such service requests are typically processed pursuant to a service level agreement between the company (IT department) and the ERP software manufacturer and/or service provider. Often times, when such an error occurs, the IT department refers to their service level agreement to determine if it can even get support from the ERP software manufacturer and/or service provider to resolve the error. If, pursuant to the service level agreement, the ERP software manufacturer and/or service provider is required to provide support for such an error, the IT department usually calls or e-mails the technical support representative of the ERP software manufacturer and/or service provider and informs them of the error. Upon being notified, the ERP software manufactuer and/or service provider then refers to their copy of the service level agreement to confirm that they are required to provide support and then provides support as required by the service level agreement. However, because of the many manual steps involved in this process, the time it takes for the service request to be eventually resolved is not optimized.
Thus, there is a need for an IT services and application management solution that reduces the operational workload and optimizes the daily support process.